My youngest daughter is currently a college student, studying literature. This focus gives her a different eye on many of the HR topics I usually address in my blogs and that eye is what brings me to the topic of this blog. We were discussing her studies and she brought up a man named Niccolò Machiavelli. He is best known for his book, The Prince. The purpose of the book was to outline the goals of the Medicis, those ruling in Florence Italy, where he was living in the fifteen and sixteenth century, and how he believed they could attain those goals. His name is frequently associated with a very rigid sense of rules and some, when it was first introduced, thought his views were tyrannical – while this could be true at that time, with some creative interpretation, he had some important ideas that could apply to the modern day business world of Human Resources.